Friday, May 28, 2010

Brain is the central organ of the human body. It is extremely complex and sophisticated. The functions of the brain were found by the ancient Egyptians and Greeks in 400 BC. It was Hippocrates who first discovered that brain played an important role in sensation and intelligence. Nowadays, everyone understand the importance of having the brain, but most of us don’t know much about it, so here are some interesting facts for you.

(image credits: jepoirrier)

1) There are no pain receptors in the brain, so the brain can feel no pain.

2) The human brain is the fattest organ in the body and may consists of at least 60% fat.

3) Neurons develop at the rate of 250,000 neurons per minute during early pregnancy.

4) Humans continue to make new neurons throughout life in response to mental activity.

6) Altitude makes the brain see strange visions – Many religions involve special visions that occurred at great heights. For example, Moses encountered a voice emanating from a burning bush on Mount Sinai and Muhammad was visited by an angel on Mount Hira. Similar phenomena are reported by mountain climbers, but they don’t think it’s very mystical. Many of the effects are attributable to the reduced supply of oxygen to the brain. At 8,000ft or higher, some mountaineers report perceiving unseen companions, seeing light emanating from themselves or others, seeing a second body like their own, and suddenly feeling emotions such as fear. Oxygen deprivation is likely to interfere with brain regions active in visual and face processing, and in emotional events.

7) Reading aloud and talking often to a young child promotes brain development.

8 ) Information travels at different speeds within different types of neurons. Not all neurons are the same. There are a few different types within the body and transmission along these different kinds can be as slow as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec.

9) The capacity for such emotions as joy, happiness, fear, and shyness are already developed at birth. The specific type of nurturing a child receives shapes how these emotions are developed.

10) The left side of your brain (left hemisphere) controls the right side of your body; and, the right side of your brain (right hemisphere) controls the left side of your body.

11) Children who learn two languages before the age of five alters the brain structure and adults have a much denser gray matter.

12) Information can be processed as slowly as 0.5 meters/sec or as fast as 120 meters/sec (about 268 miles/hr).

13) While awake, your brain generates between 10 and 23 watts of power–or enough energy to power a light bulb.

14) The old adage of humans only using 10% of their brain is not true. Every part of the brain has a known function.

15) A study of one million students in New York showed that students who ate lunches that did not include artificial flavors, preservatives, and dyes did 14% better on IQ tests than students who ate lunches with these additives.

16) For years, scientists believed that tinnitus was due to a function within the mechanics of the ear, but newer evidence shows that it is actually a function of the brain.

17) Every time you recall a memory or have a new thought, you are creating a new connection in your brain.

18) Memories triggered by scent have a stronger emotional connection, therefore appear more intense than other memory triggers.

19) Each time we blink, our brain kicks in and keeps things illuminated so the whole world doesn’t go dark each time we blink (about 20,000 times a day).

20) Laughing at a joke is no simple task as it requires activity in five different areas of the brain.

21) The average number of thoughts that humans are believed to experience each day is 70,000.

22) There are two different schools of thought as to why we dream: the physiological school, and the psychological school. While many theories have been proposed, not single consensus has emerged as to why we dream. Some researchers suggest that dreams serve no real purpose, while other believe that dreaming is essential to mental, emotional and physical well-being. One theory for dreaming suggests dreams serve to clean up clutter from the mind.

23) The Hypothalamus part of the brain regulates body temperature much like a thermostat. The hypothalamus knows what temperature your body should be (about 98.6 Fahrenheit or 37 Celsius), and if your body is too hot, the hypothalamus tells it to sweat. If you’re too cold, the hypothalamus makes you start shivering. Shivering and sweating helps get your body’s temperature back to normal.

24) Approximately 85,000 neocortical neurons are lost each day in your brain. Fortunately, his goes unnoticed due to the built-in redundancies and the fact that even after three years this loss adds up to less than 1% of the total.

25) Differences in brain weight and size do not equal differences in mental ability. The weight of Albert Einstein’s brain was 1,230 grams that is less than an average weight of the human brain.

26) A living brain is so soft you could cut it with a table knife.

27) There are about 100,000 miles of blood vessels in the brain.

28) London taxi drivers ,famous for knowing all the London streets by heart, have a larger than normal hippocampus, especially the drivers who have been on the job longest. The study suggests that as people memorize more and more information, this part of their brain continues to grow.

29) The brain can live for 4 to 6 minutes without oxygen, and then it begins to die. No oxygen for 5 to 10 minutes will result in permanent brain damage.

30) Our brain often fools us. It often perceives things differently from the reality. Look at those pictures. Square A and B are actually the same shade of gray.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Days to Create Habit, 14 Days to Break the Habit
We all have vices, even though we may not all admit that we have them. Some people smoke, other people go shopping too much, and still others sit in front of their laptop every night eating a full bag of nacho chips while writing articles.
There's an old saying that it takes 7 days to create a habit and 14 days to break a habit. I don't know how true it is, but it does.I know we can start bad habits in 7 days or less, but breaking them is always harder.
Bad habits come in many forms and there are many factors to the bad habit. Determine the triggers of the bad habit first and foremost.
The first question you should ask when you plan to break a habit is how serious are you about breaking it? If you are really committed to getting rid of it, your chance of succeeding is much higher than if you lack this commitment. Be aware that breaking habits requires focused energy and you need to concentrate on observing your behaviour over a period of time.
In which situations are you performing the habit you want to get rid of. How often are you doing it and are there special things from your environment that trigger your behaviour? You should set aside a period of time just to observe yourself and your behaviour. Write down and keep track of when you do the unwanted behaviour. It is also important that you find out exactly what your thoughts and feelings are each time you perform your unwanted behaviour. When you write this down, you will be much more aware of when and why you perform this habit.
Now, take your notebook, read what you have written and ask yourself, "Which function has this habit for me? What does it really do for me? What pleasure does this habit give me? Which pain do I avoid with this behaviour? Does it prevent anxiety, stress, nausea? Does it make me feel more confident?
Think about this and write down some alternative behaviours to the habit you want to get rid of that would be a better and more positive way to handle the feelings or the situation that is associated with it. How can this new behaviour or new habit make you feel pleasure or prevent you from feeling pain as well as the old one. Select one or a few alternative behaviours or habits and start to practice them.
Be careful to observe your behaviour and as soon as you notice that you are practicing your old habit, stop yourself and start the new alternative behaviour you picked out previously. Work with this every day in the beginning one or two times a day, and increase it as the time goes by. To break an old habit and replace it with a new, isn't done overnight, but the more you practice your new behaviour, the more it becomes fixed and the more of the old one is erased.
Tell your family and friends that you are working with yourself to get rid of a habit you don't like, and they will probably help and support you in your endeavour to get rid of .
There are many ways to self improvement. Here are some tips for getting rid of a bad habit. Habits are as we all know some sort of automatic behaviours and most of us employ habits that are far from good, thus we want to change them. There are lots of examples; smoking habits, the habit of over-eating, the habit of forgetting certain things like umbrellas and gloves, the habit of interrupting other people when they talk etc.
Though there are many different bad habits, breaking a habit has certain things in common, whether it is a smoking habit, an over-eating habit or whatever. The tips below cover how to break a habit in general and can be applied on whichever habit you want to break.
The first question you should ask when you plan to break a habit is how serious are you about breaking it? If you are really committed to getting rid of it, your chance of succeeding is much higher than if you lack this commitment. Be aware that breaking habits requires focused energy and you need to concentrate on observing your behaviour over a period of time.
In which situations are you performing the habit you want to get rid of. How often are you doing it and are there special things from your environment that trigger your behaviour? You should set aside a period of time just to observe yourself and your behaviour. Write down and keep track of when you do the unwanted behaviour. It is also important that you find out exactly what your thoughts and feelings are each time you perform your unwanted behaviour. When you write this down, you will be much more aware of when and why you perform this habit.
Now, take your notebook, read what you have written and ask yourself, "Which function has this habit for me? What does it really do for me? What pleasure does this habit give me? Which pain do I avoid with this behaviour? Does it prevent anxiety, stress, nausea? Does it make me feel more confident?
Think about this and write down some alternative behaviours to the habit you want to get rid of that would be a better and more positive way to handle the feelings or the situation that is associated with it. How can this new behaviour or new habit make you feel pleasure or prevent you from feeling pain as well as the old one. Select one or a few alternative behaviours or habits and start to practice them.
Be careful to observe your behaviour and as soon as you notice that you are practicing your old habit, stop yourself and start the new alternative behaviour you picked out previously. Work with this every day in the beginning one or two times a day, and increase it as the time goes by. To break an old habit and replace it with a new, isn't done overnight, but the more you practice your new behaviour, the more it becomes fixed and the more of the old one is erased.
A - Analyze the Bad Habit
First, it is important to determine whether the undesired behavior is simply a bad habit or if it stems from an addiction. A habit is just an acquired pattern of behavior while an addiction includes psychological or physiological dependency. Keep in mind that if an addiction is present, as is often the case with tobacco or alcohol use, professional help may be necessary.
To successfully break a bad habit, it is essential to know when, where and why it occurs. Nail biting and other nervous habits, for instance, are often totally unconscious activities. Awareness of any nervous behavior may not reach the conscious mind until someone points it out. In order to successfully deal with undesirable behavior, establish when and where it is most likely to occur.
Once the behavior has been analyzed, a plan with specific steps to counter the behavior must be developed and put into place. Breaking a bad habit is possible but takes forethought and some clever strategizing. Dealing with an addiction, rather than just a habit, will be more difficult but these tips may still be of u

If you’re looking for ways how to get rid of bad habits and behaviors, this will be the perfect article for you. I’m going to share with you how you can ‘delete’ your bad habits and behaviors today.
You know, success is all about what you do in your life. And therefore, your habits and behaviors play important roles in it.
If you’re someone who procrastinate a lot and lazy to take action, you’ll never produce the results you want in your life. Your negative habits will not bring you the results you want.
As a result, you must start by adopting positive and empowering habits that will bring you what you want in your life.
To get rid of your negative habits, you must first understand what creates them.
Your habits are created by your thoughts. When you were born into this world, you have no habits. You pick up your habits from the influence from your surrounding and your own life experiences.
Your parents, your friends, your teachers, your boss, your peers… basically anyone can affect your habits by influencing your thoughts.
Once you have a certain thought in your mind, your mind will start to send signals to your emotion and hence you will take a certain set of action, which is your habits, to produce a certain results.
And after you’ve got the results, you’ll reinforce the thoughts in your mind.
For example, what will you do if I give you $100 right now? It depends on your habit toward the extra money. Some people will use to buy something they love, some people will buy meals, and some people will save or invest it.
When you invest the money, you’ll feel satisfy. This feeling of satisfaction will reinforce your brain and that next time if you ever receive any extra money, you’ll invest it as well.
On the other hand, if you spend the money to buy something that you desire, the instant gratification will also help to reinforce the thoughts in your mind.
Unless something ‘bad’ happened, you’ll keep on cycling the same pattern over and over again.
What I mean is, if you want to change your habit, you must create a new thought and emotion in your mind to replace the existing pattern.
It is not like computer, which you can simply press on the delete button to delete away files that you don’t want. Your mind works differently in ‘deleting’ negative thoughts or habits that you don’t want.
Like what I mentioned above, if you want to get rid of your negative habits and behaviors, you’ll have to start by replacing your old patterns with new ones.
Take back the previous example. If you spend the $100 I give you into gambling, and you lose them all, will this result help you to better manage your extra money you get in the future? Of course it would.
Conversely, if you invest the $100 into something, and you earn an extra $100 from it, which now you have $200 at your hand, you’ll definitely create a strong emotion and thought pattern into your mind about investing.
You’ll most likely to invest any extra money I give you in the future. This is how you can change your habits and behaviors.
Some people procrastinate all the time. They choose to watch TV instead of investing their time into reading development books. They get instant gratification of feeling joy when watching TV. This will reinforce their thought pattern that watching TV is good and reading books is something they don’t like.
This cycle will keep on going until one day, something forces them to change. Such as if they did not change their habits, they’ll be in dept. When this happen, they’ll forces themselves to take different set of action that will lead to different results.
And if they get positive results, they’ll form a new thought pattern and new habits for themselves.
This is exactly how your mind works and how your habits can be formed and replaced with new and empowering ones.
So start by noticing your old thinking patterns that lead you to a certain habit.
After that, try to create a new thinking by asking empowering questions and focus on positive thoughts. When you do this, you’ll feel the difference. Take action that will lead you to the results you want immediately.
Once you have taken the action, you’ll get the results you want and you’ll create change in your mind, or reinforce your thought pattern.
This is the real art of how to get rid of bad habits and behaviors.